Tag: learn

Waymo’s engineers are modeling not only how cars recognize objects in the road, for example, but how human behavior affects how cars should behave. Her role is to ensure our interactions with Waymo’s self-driving cars – as pedestrians, as passengers, as fellow drivers – are wholly positive. A year later, Google’s self-driving car project “Graduated” and became an independent company called Waymo. AI specialists from the Google Brain team regularly collaborate with Dolgov and his fellow engineers at Waymo on methods to improve the accuracy of its self-driving cars. Waymo doesn’t have a monopoly on machines with brains. If Waymo wants its driverless cars to be smart enough to operate in any environment and under any conditions – defined as Level 5 autonomy – it needs a powerful enough infrastructure to scale its self-driving system. The future of AI at Waymo isn’t sentient vehicles The future of AI at Waymo isn’t sentient vehicles. These days, the most challenging driving environments require self-driving cars to make guidance decisions without white lines, Botts Dots, or clear demarcations at the edge of the road. If Waymo can build machine learning models to train its neural nets to drive on streets with unclear markings, than Waymo’s self-driving cars can put the Phoenix suburbs in its rear view and eventually hit the open road..

That’s why many people tend to approach the topic of learning without much focus. Here’s one example of a study that shows how learning strategies can be more important than raw smarts when it comes to gaining expertise. Marcel Veenman has found that people who closely track their thinking will outscore others who have sky-high IQ levels when it comes to learning something new. Here are three practical ways to build your learning skills, based on research. Studies consistently show that people with clear goals outperform people with vague aspirations like “Do a good job.” By setting targets, people can manage their feelings more easily and achieve progress with their learning. It turns out that we need to let go of our learning in order to understand our learning. The good news from all of this – for individuals and for companies looking to help their employees be their best – is that learning is a learned behavior. By deliberately organizing your learning goals, thinking about your thinking, and reflecting on your learning at opportune times, you can become a better study, too.

Over half of the classes didn’t involve students except in the form of “Sporadic questions” from and to them despite “Ample evidence,” they go on, “For the limited impact of these practices and substantial interest on the part of institutions and national organizations in education reform.” Second, survey-based studies on faculty members has suggested that classroom layouts, like big amphitheaters with huge numbers of students, can be barriers to “Instructional innovation”-the unalterable structure of the room caters to the status quo. The study found, when teachers have flexible layouts and less students they tend to fall back to lecturing. Third, you’ve got to sit in on a teacher at least four times to accurately assess their teaching method-how frequently they lecture versus have students, for example, answer quiz questions using wireless clickers or work together on a group project. “These results indicate that average examination scores improved by about 6% in active learning sections,” the researchers found, “And that students in classes with traditional lecturing were 1.5 times more likely to fail than were students in classes with active learning.” “Specifically, institutions should revise their tenure, promotion, and merit-recognition policies to incentivize and reward” faculty, of “All academic ranks,” to implement ways of instructing students that have been shown to work. Olin also avoids lecturing its students, engaging them in project-based learning instead. A criticism sometimes levied at Miller is that this only suits the brightest students. “We’ve been working specifically with other universities that don’t have especially precocious students or very demanding entrance requirements to see if the principles that we’re using will still work.” “This is not what you would call a school that’s restricted for highly precocious students.” Nevertheless, it’s one of the highest-producers of Hispanic-background engineers in the U.S, and “a good fraction of those students drive over the river from Mexico every day to take classes,” Miller said.

Experts aren’t sure how the concept spread, but it might have had something to do with the self-esteem movement of the late ’80s and early ’90s. Everyone was special-so everyone must have a special learning style, too. “Teachers like to think that they can reach every student, even struggling students, just by tailoring their instruction to match each student’s preferred learning format,” said Central Michigan University’s Abby Knoll, a PhD student who has studied learning styles. The survey then gave them some study strategies that seem like they would correlate with that learning style. Students seemed to be interested in their learning styles, but not enough to actually change their studying behavior based on them. Another study published last year in the British Journal of Psychology found that students who preferred learning visually thought they would remember pictures better, and those who preferred learning verbally thought they’d remember words better. ” “Educators may actually be doing a disservice to auditory learners by continually accommodating their auditory learning style,” they wrote, “rather than focusing on strengthening their visual word skills. The “learning styles” idea has snowballed-as late as 2014, more than 90 percent of teachers in various countries believed it. Strangely, most research on learning styles starts out with a positive portrayal of the theory-before showing it doesn’t work.

Mental Models Are The Key To UnderstandingMental models help you think better because mental models are how we think. “Mental models are an explanation of how things work. They are how we decide what variables matter in a given situation and how those variables interact with one another. Mental models are how we make sense of the world.” Your head is already full of mental models of how the world works. What separates good thinkers from great thinkers is: the number of models at their disposal; the accuracy of those models; and how quickly they update their model in the face of feedback. Some of the models represent how the world works and some represent how to think. It’s a model that when combined with evolution explains to a large extent how we got here today. Typically the mental models we’re using get in the way making us unable to see their limitations or inaccuracy. You need to know how to apply your mental models to understand real problems.

If you want to bring up a kid to be a successful investor or entrepreneur, the current education system says they should be studying STEM subjects, cramming facts and figures, and immersing themselves in coding class. I’ve spent my working life as an entrepreneur and investor – I’ve founded startups, and now invest across Europe for GV – but as a father, when I look at the way we’re educating our kids, I think there’s something missing. Computers already store facts faster and better than we do, but struggle to perfect things we learn as toddlers, such as dexterity and walking. We should aim to teach our kids about the power of creativity in every area. It’s not even clear that it’s worth teaching kids how to code. So the most important skill we can instill in our kids is empathy – a sense of shared humanity, and the ability to understand the needs and motivations of others. It’s increasingly critical for our kids, who will need empathy to create products and services that are useful and desirable for a world of customers unlike themselves. Let’s take advantage of the remarkable capabilities in technologies we’ve developed – and at the same time, help ourselves and our kids strengthen and enhance our uniquely human qualities.

The hallmark of intelligence is the ability to learn. The brain may be highly flexible and adaptive overall, but at least over short time frames, it learns by inefficiently recycling tricks from its neural repertoire rather than rewiring from scratch. Now, while observing activity in the brain during learning, Yu and his colleagues have seen evidence of a similar lack of plasticity at the neural level. In 2014, the researchers observed that test subjects could learn new tasks more easily if they involved patterns of neural activity within the intrinsic manifold rather than outside it. Then the team switched the neural activity requirements for moving the cursor and waited to see what new patterns of neural activity, corresponding to new points in the intrinsic manifold, the animals would use to accomplish them. Why would the brain use less than the best strategy for learning? The group’s findings suggest that, just as the neural architecture constrains activity to the intrinsic manifold, some further constraint limits how the neurons reorganize their activity during the experiments. Chase likened the motor cortex to an old-fashioned telephone switchboard, with neural connections like cables linking inputs from other cortical areas to outputs in the brain’s cerebellum. The researchers can’t yet rule out the possibility that reassociation is a fast interim way for the brain to learn new tasks; over a longer time period, realignment or rescaling might still show up.

When trying to learn a foreign language, most of us have the same complaint: “I’m just not good at memorising.” Learning new vocabulary can be daunting, especially for busy adults whose minds are already occupied with work, family, and other responsibilities. A comfort? Linguists say that to “Get by” in a language, such as directing a taxi or asking for a phone number, it takes a vocabulary of about 120 basic words. Forget the long vocabulary study sheets, or reading the dictionary. Experts say that learners are capable or retaining 10-20 words per study hour. If you do 15 minutes of self-study per day, set a weekly vocabulary goal of 20-25 words and phrases. That’s only six weeks until the 120-word “Survival kit” is learned and memorised. Those one-word-a-day language learning apps may feel convenient, but thematically, they’re all over the place, delivering a chain of unrelated words: envelope, tired, January, receive, onion. The mind naturally clusters connected words together, so learning, say, types of weather in one lesson, and parts of the body the next, works in tune with your brain’s natural system for classifying information.

The students thought they were much further along in the learning curve toward workplace success than their future employers did. Specifically, our research focused on the common task of probabilistic learning in which people learn to read cues from the environment to predict some outcome. Participants estimated their accuracy rate was 73% when it had not hit even 60%. It appears that Alexander Pope was right when he said that a little learning is a dangerous thing. In our studies, just a little learning was enough to make participants feel they had learned the task. Other research has found that doctors learning to do spinal surgery usually do not begin to make mistakes until their 15th iteration of the surgery. As with probabilistic learning, it has been shown that most people under the age of 18 have little knowledge of personal finance. Personal finance is something most learn by trial and error. Of course, the beginner must struggle to learn – but the beginner must also guard against an illusion they have learned too quickly.

Deliberate practice refers to the intensely focused practice of a skill, habit, or ability. To practice deliberately, you have to break down skills into blocks of discrete micro-skills, map out the order in which you need to learn those micro-skills, and closely monitor your progress. For some skills, it can be easy to find proven curricula to guide your deliberate practice. Ask yourself, “Where do I anticipate having an opportunity in the course of my actual day-to-day business life, to practice this skill?” Maybe you can practice this new micro-skill during a conversation with an employee, a meeting with your management team, or a phone call with a vendor. Then consider what it would look like for you to start practicing this new micro-skill. Namely, what were two, three, or four things that you did well? And what was one specific lesson that you learned from this practice session-something that you’d like to handle differently next time? If you practice it every day for three or four days a week, you’ll find that you can acquire new skills with incredible rapidity. These are the five elements that transform “Practice” into “Deliberate practice.” Good luck using them to speed up your development of your staff.